Tracking the Buzz

CommunityAudio

Listen to a conversation that I had with Sean Coon, who is a web developer and consultant that got in touch with me after listening to a good number of my interview and community podcasts. We had an hour conversation talking about some of the trends in new media as well as where The Echo Chamber Project is headed.

Sean is very excited about the project from both a technological and political view, and so I look forward for having him get more involved as the project evolves. He also recently moved to Greensboro, North Carolina where the local newspaper has been actively involved in integrating blogging and citizen journalism into their local coverage -- listen to this interview with Lex Alexander for more details.

I should also note that there will be three main end products with the Echo Chamber Project:

[1] The 90-minute documentary that focuses on the media performance during the build-up to the war;
[2] An annotated multimedia experience of the entire archive of material that supplements the film and provides a proof of concept for how new media technologies can make the press more collaborative and inclusive of many different perspectives; and
[3] The open source tools and methodologies that were used to create the other two end products.

The majority of the interview audio that I've released so far has been focused on the second end product. These interviews are more solution-oriented and forward-looking, and the interviews average around 15 minutes each.

Soon I will also be releasing the audio from the interviews that focus on the preformance of the media leading up to the war in Iraq. These interviews illuminate the problems and limitations with the media, and average around 50 minutes each.

In this conversation with Sean, I mention a speech that former New York Times ombudsman Daniel Okrent gave where he mentions that the three biggest issues that people wrote in and complained about were: Accuracy, Bias and Arrogance. I talk about how collaborative media could potentially address each of these issues.

Good has put together the most comprehensive launching pad to The Echo Chamber Project so far filling by his post with a lot of good pointers and graphics. He introduces me and the project by saying:

Kent Bye, is the author of a unique film documentary in progress that may become a future model for grassroots citizen journalism, while showing how to invest filmmaking skills and ideas in a production that has some real informative values and developing the first web-based collaborative video editing approach to build open-source movies and documentaries.

Check out the rest of the post, and the complete transcript for the interview here.

But I wanted to follow up with Sifry to find out how open source, collaborative media could interact with open source politics. This was one of the important insights from our conversation:

I think campaigns may be the last place where the innovations are going to start. Because the pressure of doing a campaign is so intense and there really are so many conventional ingredients that people feel that they have to do. And the innovations are going to come -- in the political arena -- they're going to come from the edges, and they're also going to come from, I believe, from ongoing issues. Organizations that work on issues or new organizations that are being create to work on issues because they have a longer life span. And they can be incubators for new ways for doing things that in some cases campaigns, you just don't have the time -- or at best, you have time to try one or two new things and then keep going.

So in a traditional politial campaign, by the time you've gathered together the professional instincts from the fundraising team, scheduler, field team, communications team, web team, campaign manager and pollsters, then there really isn't a lot of room left for thinking outside of the box.

Most of the radical innovations for network centric advocacy will probably come from long-term, issue-based campaigns and from organizations who are able to bring together existing networks to collectively scratch the same itch at the same time.

I hope that The Echo Chamber Project can provide some new ways for collaborating and communicating with rich media.

Sifry is also interested in having someone explain why Drupal is such an interesting platform, and to explain the practical needs of the developer community to the larger audience of the political technology community at Personal Democracy.

A Discussion with Webjay.org's Lucas Gonze about his playlist community, and how playlist concepts can be applied to film editing and citizen journalism. Playlists being lists of songs, and Edit Decision Lists being lists of audio sound bites and lists of video clips. We also discuss reputation, identity, and distribution.